Design and development of speckle-free high-power laser-driven phosphor converted compact automotive headlamp module

Abstract The applicability of diode-lasers in automobile headlights is an advanced innovation for the automobile illumination industry due to the extraordinary properties of laser light over conventional light sources, such as high brightness, wide colour gamut, high directionality, low energy consumptions and long lifetime. Lasers are highly coherent in nature, so they encounter the problem of unwanted speckles and spurious fringes and always require a high level of opto-thermal engineering along with speckle reduction mechanisms for high lumen laser applications. Targeting such challenges, in this paper, we report an innovative design and development scheme for a high lumen laser-based automotive headlamp module. The headlamp prototype comprises a set of four cylindrical diffusers which distribute the high energy laser radiation via scattering along the length of the diffusers within a metallic mirro-based pyramidal cavity reflector. The scattered laser light from cylindrical diffusers interacts with a remote phosphor layer that prevents phosphor–resin burning. The pyramidal cavity reflector plays an important role in making the laser light uniform and speckle-free, via spatial and angular diversity, as light exits from the cavity after multiple internal reflections. This reflector redirects the highly concentrated white light over a long range without using any projection lens. The design and performance of the headlight system was studied using TracePro simulation software and tested experimentally in a photometric laboratory. The International Commission on Illumination (CIE) coordinates of the light generated by the headlamp was (0.3947, 0.4908) and the correlated colour temperature was 4240 K, which represents warm white light illumination.